I suggest that education rather than "blame" might be in order.  To further
this educational aim, check out www.w3.org/wai for guidelines useful to web
designers and set up so developers can easily follow the directions given
and thus design or alter web sites so they become more accessable.  Please
understand that this is not an easy issue for many reasons.  Lack of
knowledge is truly something we need to work with people to overcome.  I
doubt designers lie awake at night and plan their pages so people cannot
access them.  The tools needed to design pages well are not always ones
they know how to obtain..  The site given above also has links providing
more tools.

E. Aldworth

At 07:56 AM 3/2/99 , you wrote:
>I can't agree with this idea that web page speech packages should do more
>to make the pages usable.  The blame rightly belongs on the page
>designers, because if the page is designed properly, there is little or no
>need to make special considerations for the screen readers.  That is the
>point.  While a speech program certainly Can make it easier to view a web
>page, the point is, it shouldn't have to.   With properly designed pages,
>special treatment is not necessary.  Period.  This idea that the speech
>synthesizer should handle mal programmed pages is silly.
>
>
>VICUG-L is the Visually Impaired Computer User Group List.
>To join or leave the list, send a message to
>[log in to unmask]  In the body of the message, simply type
>"subscribe vicug-l" or "unsubscribe vicug-l" without the quotations.
> VICUG-L is archived on the World Wide Web at
>http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/vicug-l.html


VICUG-L is the Visually Impaired Computer User Group List.
To join or leave the list, send a message to
[log in to unmask]  In the body of the message, simply type
"subscribe vicug-l" or "unsubscribe vicug-l" without the quotations.
 VICUG-L is archived on the World Wide Web at
http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/vicug-l.html